Delicious Library 2 is Finished!

Don’t run off and check the Delicious Monster site or the unofficial forums just yet. Still, I think I’ve got the goods on Delicious Library 2. In Wil Shipley’s latest personal blog post, he talks a lot about his visit to TED this past week and how he’s completely infatuated with Meg Ryan. After obsessing about whether Matt Groening really thinks he’s funny or Meg Ryan digs his buns of steel, Shipley dropped a innocuous comment that Delicious Library 2 is included in the TED swag bag.

He also mentioned that Peter Gabriel is going to save $60 in upgrade fees (and yes, I’m sure that is pretty important to someone in his position). I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that means the upgrade fee is $20 (or half the cost of a full license) and Gabriel owns three licenses (which is three more than anything I’ve ever sold to an A-list celebrity). Still, I’m not sure why receiving one copy of DL2 would remove the need to upgrade other licenses. If Gabriel doesn’t need separate upgrade licenses, why did he need separate full licenses in the first place?

So why do I care? Well, I like collecting stuff. I’m a bit of a bibliophile (I’m working on a Master’s in History, so this should be no surprise) and Delicious Library is a fun app. The need for it isn’t so great since I’ve discovered LibraryThing last year, but I still enjoy it. I also have a modest CD and DVD collection. DVDProfiler, which I love, hasn’t been updated in a while and Listal seems to cover most of my needs, but I still like the offline access in DL.

I still think that the next generation of collecting software needs to be online, or at least an online/desktop hybrid. Collecting is in the sweet spot for social software concepts. I’d like to manage my collection, but also share it with others, see what my friends like, get recommendations based on the collective wisdom of the crowd, leverage a shared database of detailed information collated by OCD collectors (the great success of DVDProfiler), write reviews to share, rate items, etc. All those things work better online.

There’s still room for desktop software and offline tools, but I’d love to see something like bi-directional sync with DL2. Here’s to hoping!

In any case, we should find out what DL2 can do as soon as the upgrades are made available to the unwashed masses who didn’t make it to TED this year.